Dunn et al. (2011) argue for the following four theses. First, they argue that there is no evidence of a crosslinguistic word order correlation between certain pairs of elements for which a correlation has been claimed in the previous literature. Second, they argue that although some correlations do exist, they are specific to individual families and not universal. Furthermore, they argue that,...

Naming practices offer a window onto linguistic processes of productivity that rely on input from interacting streams of information. Previous studies have looked at proper personal names and binomial combinations of proper personal names to show that phonological features such as rhythm, semantic features such as gender, and corpus features such as word frequency play an important role in nami...

Where do the different sentence orders in the languages of the world come from? Recently, it has been suggested that there is a basic sentence order, SOV (Subject-Object-Verb), which was the starting point for other sentence orders. Backup for this claim was found in newly emerging languages, as well as in experiments where people are asked to convey simple meanings in improvised gesture produc...

Automatically evaluating word order of MT system output at the sentence-level is challenging. At the sentence-level, ngram counts are rather sparse which makes it difficult to measure word order quality effectively using lexicalized units. Recent approaches abstract away from lexicalization by assigning a score to the permutation representing how word positions in system output move around rela...

We describe two experiments using French noun-noun combinations which parallel a study carried out by Gagné (2001) using English combinations. The order of the modifier and head noun are reversed in French, allowing us to investigate whether the influence of relation priming that Gagné found is due to the order of the modifier and head noun or whether it is due to their different functional rol...

We argue that the grammatical diversity observed among the world's languages emerges from the struggle between individual cognitive systems trying to impose their preferred structure on human language. We investigate the cognitive bases of the two most common word orders in the world's languages: SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and SVO. Evidence from language change, grammaticalization, stability of ...

Free-word order languages have long posed significant problems for s tandard parsing algorithms. This paper reports on an implemented parser, based on GovernmentBinding theory (GB) (Chomsky, 1981, 1982), for a particular free-word order language, Warlpiri, an aboriginal language of central Australia. The parser is explicitly designed to t ransparent ly mirror the principles of GB. The operation...

There is a broad concensus among researchers working within the paradigm of HPSG that argument-inheritance (Hinrichs and Nakazawa (1989; 1994)) is an essential operation in the analysis of so-called verb clusters in German. An argument-inheritance verb subcategorizes for an unsaturated verbal complement, and for all the complements on the COMPS-list of this verbal complement. In German, auxilia...

This paper is concerned with applications of-nite state automata (FSA) to word order processing. As the surface order of constituents is a function of many interacting factors, an adequate formalisation seems fairly complicated. I argue that despite this complexity, most ordering constraints observed in free word order languages can be treated by lower-level methods such as nite state automata....